


Scenes from a Night's Dream

by SegaBarrett



Series: Todd and Michaela [1]
Category: Breaking Bad, How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21751534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Snapshots of Todd's early life.
Series: Todd and Michaela [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1928920
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Scenes from a Night's Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad or HTGAWM and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is from a Genesis song and much of the inspiration for some of the scenes came from this song.
> 
> A/N 2: I wrote this for Fortune Favors but I missed the deadline.

He had loved to sit out on the porch, where he could peek across the yards and see the girl who lived next door.

Her name was Michaela, and Todd thought she was very pretty. She was older than him – six at least, and whenever they played classroom she would always want to be the teacher. 

They would go around the back of the house and climb up into a tree so they could see everyone down below.

Todd’s mom, Felicia, was usually down there, and she usually wasn’t alone.

Sometimes they stayed out there all night, on the days Todd’s mom forgot to come out and get him. 

That was a lot of days.

***

Todd didn’t get a chance to say goodbye when Uncle Jack came to get him. After all, he picked him up from the hospital, where everything was too bright and everything beeped and the nurses always sounded like everything was super serious but also like they didn’t really care at all and Todd was confused.

He had a new room in a new apartment and no other kids lived in the apartment complex. The people who did never really talked to Uncle Jack and seemed like they might have been a little afraid of him; they were always darting around like mice when they passed him by.

Todd wasn’t afraid of Uncle Jack. He didn’t really know what it was to be afraid of anyone, not since the hospital; maybe they had taken that part out of him and left something else behind in its place. 

Jack bought him an entire closet of clothes, all black and brown. 

“You’re going to want to blend in, Toddy,” he told him, “That’s the way that you get them.”

Todd didn’t ask who “them” was, but he pictured a huge, overarching creature looking down on them, like Godzilla or something. 

Ready to smash them all at a moment’s notice.

***

Todd was packed up in Jack’s truck and driven to a big building with red brick on the outside and a blacktop around it.

“This is your school,” Uncle Jack explained, walking him up to the front and continuing, “Now you act normal, you hear? I don’t want any kind of reports about you.”

They sat him in a desk in a midst of students, yammering and crying and pushing and shoving, blips on a screen and white noise in his ear.

“Why don’t you ask Todd if he wants to play?” he heard the teacher ask a few times.

But for some reason, they never did.

***

Michaela and Todd had sat on Michaela’s porch in tiny plastic chairs, holding tiny metal tea cups and pouring tea.

“Oh yes, Prince Todd,” Michaela announced. “Won’t you pass the tea?”

Todd would giggle so hard that he could barely catch his breath to speak, to reply that yes, he would pour for Princess Michaela, the prettiest princess in the whole wide world.

And Mr. Pickles, Todd’s cat, who Todd’s mother’s current boyfriend had tossed out the door a week before, had plopped down on one of the chairs because Michaela had found him and he was Michaela’s cat now.

Sir Pickles, she said he would be called now, their valiant knight.

And Todd had been happy.

***

He sat in a desk in a little row and watched as the teacher walked two and fro in front of the blackboard, writing things on the board that really didn’t make any sense.  
He didn’t say anything. 

Uncle Jack had told him to act normal. Doing something other than that – something outside the normal – would make Uncle Jack bad and sad and mad the way he had been when he got Todd from the hospital, and Todd did not want that no siree. 

The teacher plopped worksheets down on top of Todd’s desk, and he would stare at them. How was he supposed to know what was normal to write?

So instead, he wrote nothing at all except for his name, Todd Alquist, all curves and curly-q’s, as need as could be, and he would pass it up front and watch with a flat expression as the teacher always stared at it; sometimes she would let out a little hiss of exasperation and other times it was like she didn’t bother to look at it at all.

The teacher would lean down at look at him, give him a big, indulgent grin and tell him in low tones about how he needed to try his hardest and do his best.

Todd wasn’t sure what his best even meant.

***

Michaela would come to Todd in his dreams. They were always sitting in a treehouse, peeking out over the edge, able to peek into the very top of trees. Fruit was always scattered around the branches, within reach, but he never went for it because it was better to stay right where he was.

The sun was always just about to come down, but it didn’t matter because they could stay as long as they wanted. No one was going to tell them that it was time to go home. 

When Todd would wake up, he couldn’t remember his dream, not completely. All he remembered was that it felt like something had left that he couldn’t understand.

***

“You feeling all right?”

Todd looked up to see Uncle Jack pacing in front of him.

“I mean, with this…” He trailed off, and Todd cocked his head to the side and looked at him before nodding. “Good,” Jack continued. “If you don’t… you know, try and fight through it but we got some Tylenol if not.”

Todd looked at him and nodded again. He didn’t feel bad. He didn’t feel anything at all.

***

Everything felt different when he was dreaming. Those were the moments where he remembered little tiny things, like the way the sun had looked when he and Michaela had sat in the treehouse. 

When they put their hands together, they could create a world for themselves, and that world could be anything they chose it to be.  
Michaela had always done most of the talking. She was good at that. 

Even though her clothes were a few sizes too big and always looked like they had already been worn a week or two at a time, but when she stood up straight and crossed her arms, he always believed that she was a princess or a teacher or a lawyer or whatever she told him that she was.

“We have to watch out,” she told him once, “the evil wizard will get us otherwise. We have to be very, very quiet.”

Usually, Todd would start giggling, and that would set Michaela off too. But this time he stayed silent, as dead silent as possible, because hiding from evil people, wizards or not, had become very, very real.

They could come at you when you were sleeping – that was when they would usually creep up on you.

Michaela told him that was because that was when they could cast their spells, because you couldn’t fight against them. 

“You can get at them if you fight them in your dream, though,” she told him, and her eyes were very, very serious.

And Todd believed her.

***

It wasn’t until Todd was six that Jack brought him to the compound again. 

“You know Toddy. Take care of him. If he needs anything, you get it for him. Keep him out of any mess,” Jack instructed, and then he glided out of view. His coat was shining in the low light, shiny black and pooling at his waist. Everyone looked up when he walked by; everyone snapped to attention.

Kenny was always talking, jabbering along to Todd about this and that. Most of it he didn’t understand; it was snow tapping against a window. He seemed to regard Todd as a new and novel toy, swiping his finger around and seeing if Todd would follow it, or making comments and then following them up with a mocking laugh and a declaration of, “You ain’t old enough to understand that yet, boy, but you will!”

The others stayed out of his way, other than to guide him away from the hole in the ground that was covered over in bars, or to tell him to turn around and not wander too far. 

“Jack would kill us if we lost you,” one of them, Frankie, declared, and Todd wondered how far he would have to go to be lost.

***

Michaela was better at climbing trees, so it made sense that she would be better at climbing the huge mushrooms, too. When they got to the top, they would be able to see the whole kingdom.

“Why, there will be anything we could think of,” she told him. “We don’t ever have to be scared and no one will tell us what to do.”

“What’s that?” Todd asked, pointing out into the distance. Her face lit up as she craned her head towards the horizon.

“It’s a dragon,” she insisted, “And look.” There was one huge, yellow dragon-eye looking right at them. “Let’s climb on and see where he takes us.”

***

“I don’t want to work with Todd. He never talks and he’s creepy and weird,” spoke up the girl who sat next to him – Valerie, that was her name, Valerie. She had long brown hair and she was always talking about what a good dancer she was, but Todd had never seen her actually do any dancing, just her talking about it.

The teacher sighed; it was one of those long, shuddering, exasperated sighs, the ones that Todd’s mom used to always do whenever Todd tried to pull on her shirt to pull her back to him. 

“Each work on your own,” the teacher replied, and Todd stared down at his paper where a cross-section had been drawn – four different quadrants. The teacher told the class to work together to draw a story in the panels. 

In the first panel, he drew a boy and a girl. In the next, they were on top of a mushroom. Then a dragon. And lastly… lastly…

***

The platform was moving beneath them, shaking and lowering, pulling them downward. They stared up and could see light reflecting off of a black surface.

“It’s a weight,” Michaela whispered, “Enough to crush us both. You should stay very still, Todd.” She reached out and took his hand to hold him close. “If we’re careful then it won’t get us, though – it probably gets triggered by people moving too fast.”

Todd looked up at her as the platform lowered, his feet burrowing into the ground as he clung to her hand. She wouldn’t let him get crushed – 

There was a trap door, and they fell into it – it felt as if they fell forever.

***

Todd drummed his fingers against the steering wheel of his El Camino. He finally had his driver’s license and with it – freedom, and a sense of power. He’d been promised a new job, too – Uncle Jack had told him that it was time for him to be “an earner”. 

He didn’t need to start at his job right away, however, so he had a free day to do with it what he would. 

Driving back home – to his first home – seemed the most logical way to spend the day.

He could see Felicia – he only thought of her as Felicia, now, twelve years away had dulled her in his mind. Everything was dull in Todd’s mind, though, everything always seemed like the contrast had been turned down. The memories, at least. There could be moments – a song on the radio, a pretty girl in town, or a dream.

The dreams with Michaela in them.

Could it be possible that she still lived in town? She had always been a smart kid; she had probably left already, or maybe her family had moved.

He shouldn’t hold out hope of seeing her. 

When he pulled up in front of his old house – in front of Felicia’s house – it was like he was looking at a picture out of a book instead of somewhere he had lived when he was young.

It took a few knocks for Felicia to come to the door, to narrow her eyes at him and even longer for her to seem to recognize him.

“Come in,” she said, and there were cigarette burns all over the couch like he remembered; all of the pillows were falling apart. She had stitched them back together when he was a kid, but she didn’t seem to that anymore. “Jack sent you with some money from me? Cause I need some money, okay? Rent don’t pay itself, Toddy.”

Todd looked back a her before stepping back outside.

It was lucky timing; he just caught sight of her. He almost didn’t recognize her, even walking out of the same house she had lived in when they had been children together. Her hair was styled now, fancy, and she wore high heels and a blazer over her blouse. 

She seemed to glide instead of walk.

“Michaela,” Todd called out, and she looked up, looking surprised at first and then a smile crossing her face.

“Todd,” she said, “I didn’t think you still live around here.”

***

Sometimes the dreams would come for him during the day, too; like when he was sitting in the middle of class watching the teacher walk back and forth and scratch on the board.

He would be in a tuxedo, because that seemed to be what people wore when they went somewhere real fancy. Michaela would look even fancier – she would have a long purple gown because the teacher said once that that was what royalty wore.

She would have a crown on top, too. A silver one.

He would try to draw her, sometimes, but it was like he couldn’t conjure her up when he really thought about it.

He’d never been much good at drawing, anyway.

***

Michaela dragged her leg over the last step that led into the treehouse, declaring as she did, “Remember this? Not really as easy to get up here now.”

Todd pulled himself over next to her, tripping slightly and collapsing on the wooden floor, wondering how he never got splinters lying on this thing.

Michaela laid back and stared up at the ceiling, and Todd laid back too, wondering what to say.

“So what have you been up to? You went to go live with your uncle, huh?”

“Yeah,” Todd replied.

“What’s he like?”

“Uncle Jack is… uh… he talks a lot.”

“Oh? What does he say?”

“A… lot of stuff. So hey, how about you?”

“Well… not to brag or anything, but I got into Yale. Going to leave this dump for good. I won’t have to deal with Ruthie’s anymore.” She rolled over and looked at him with a little smile. “What about you? You must be a, what, sophomore? Junior by now?”

Todd shook his head.

“I dropped out. Uncle Jack said he can get me a job at some exterminating company cause he knows somebody there.”

Michaela cocked her head to the side.

“I mean, if that’s what you want to do, I’m not knocking it, Todd. But do you really want to be an exterminator forever?”

Todd shrugged.

“I mean, nobody said forever really. Just for right now. What do you want to do after Yale?”

Michaela pulled herself into a cross-legged position, and Todd moved up to match her. 

“Law school,” she said. “That’s my plan. Do great things. Maybe become like, a senator or something.”

“I think you can. You’re real smart and stuff.”

There was something unreadable across Michaela’s face. She always seemed to feel a lot of things. Todd wondered if that was connected – Michaela was the only black person he knew, and she was the only one who seemed to have all of these feelings. Maybe that’s why he was missing it. 

“Hey, Todd,” Michaela said, “You remember what we used to do? Where we’d come up with a story? And we could pull it just out of anywhere?”

“Yeah… I do.”

“Well… it’s been a long time. Do you think we could still do it?”

Todd smiled, or at least he thought he did. 

“My grammy got me these encyclopedias. I read them sometimes. I was, uh, working through W you know. George Washington. Cut down the cherry tree and all.”

Michaela chuckled.

“Okay,” she said, “So we’re transported to back then, and Washington comes to us. He needs help getting the cherry tree chopped down…”

Todd closed his eyes and he could see the dream.

That night, when he was driving home, Todd cried for the first time since he was four years old, and the last real time in his life.


End file.
